food or possessions, and the rest of us stopped things before they got too loud—before a 'teacher' arrived and demanded to know what was going on and who was responsible.
And there is one young squatter-camp woman, Crystal Blair, who seems to be a natural bully. She hits or shoves people, takes their food or their small possessions. She amuses herself by telling lies to cause fights. ('Do you know what she said about you? I heard her! She said...') She snatches things from people, sometimes making no secret of what she's doing. She doesn't want the pitiful possessions. Sometimes she makes a show of breaking them. She wants the other women to know that she can do what she damned well pleases, and they can't stop her. She has power, and they don't
We've taught her to let Earthseed women and our possessions alone. We stood together, and let her know we're willing to make her life even more of a misery to her than it already is. We discovered by accident that all we had to do was hold her down and tug on her collar. The collar punishes her, and it punishes me and the other sharers among us if we were stupid enough to watch her suffering, but it leaves no marks. If we use her clothing to tie and gag her, then with just an occasional tug on her collar we can give her a hellish night. After we put her through one such night, she let us alone. She tormented other women. Tormenting people was her particular comfort.
We worry about her. She's crazier than most of us, and she's trouble, but she hates our 'teachers' more than we do. She won't go to them for help. In time, though, one of her victims might. We watch her. We try to keep her from going too far.
sunday, december 11, 2033
More new people have been brought here—ragged, scrawny people, all strangers. Every day this week, a maggot has arrived to unload new people in groups of three, four, or five. We've finished building a long, shedlike extension onto the school with lumber that the 'teachers' trucked in. This extension is four bare rooms of shelf beds intended to house 30 people each. Each wall is covered with three layers of shelves plus an access ladder or two. Each shelf is to be a long, narrow bed intended to sleep two people, usually either feet to feet or head to head. The new people are each given what we have: a blanket, a plastic bowl, a Bible, and a shelf where they must sleep and store their things. We still sleep on the floor in our rooms, but everything else is the same.
Like us, the new people are using buckets as toilets. Some of us are being made to dig a cesspit. I took some lashes for pointing out that it was being put in a bad place. It could contaminate the underground water that feeds our wells. That could make us all sick, including our 'teachers.'
But our 'teachers' know everything. They don't need advice from a woman, and a heathen woman at that. It was entirely their own decision a few days later to relocate the cesspit downhill and far away from the wells.
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Someone has put up a sign at the logging-road gate: 'Camp Christian Reeducation Facility.' The Crusaders have surrounded the place with a Lazor wire fence, so there's no safe entry or exit except at the gate. Lazor wire is made up of strands of wire so thin that they're hard to see. They slice into the flesh of the wild animals who blunder into them.
I've asked some of the strangers what's happening outside. Do people know what a reeducation camp really is? Are there other camps? Is there resistance? What's Jarret doing? What's going on?
Most of the new people won't talk to me. They're weary, frightened, beaten people. Those who are willing to talk know only that they were either arrested or snatched from their lives as squatters, drifters, or petty crooks.
Several of the new people are sharers. 'Bad seed if there ever was bad seed,' our 'teachers' say. 'The heathen children of drug addicts.' They treat known sharers as objects of suspicion, contempt, and ugly amusement They're so easy to torment. No challenge at all.
We have not given ourselves away, yet, we sharers of Earthseed. We've worked hard at concealing ourselves, and, I admit, we've been lucky. None of us has been pushed beyond our limits at a time when our 'teachers' might notice. All of us have had years of hiding in plain sight to help us. Even the Mora girls, only 14 and 15, have managed to hide what they are.
I kept up my search for someone who could tell me at least a little about the outside. In the end, I didn't find my informant. He found me. He was a young Black man, bone thin, scarred, careful, but not beaten down. His name was David Turner.
'Day,' he said when we found ourselves digging side by side in the stupid, dangerous cesspit that was later abandoned. I think now that he only spoke to me because we weren't supposed to speak.
I looked a question at him as I threw a shovelful of dirt out of the hole.
'Name of David,' he said. 'Call me Day.'
'Olamina,' I said without thinking.
